!1 “A Reading of La Chanson du Mal-Aimé as a Medieval Romance.” Juliet O'Brien, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University February 2003. This paper will address the problem of reading and making sense of the Chanson du Mal- Aimé, as part of the long-standing debate around its organisation. The first difficulty to catch the reader’s eye is a disjunction between the title, “la chanson du mal-aimé,” and the epigraph’s “et je chantais cette romance.” Reading on, the disjunction is recalled by the fourth and fifth lines of stanza 19, “la romance du mal aimé / et des chansons pour les sirènes.” As stanza 19 is repeated in stanza 59, the final one, chanson and romance are key parts of an important refrain. Some critics spot this chanson/romance disjunction, but then dismiss it as a serious problem, due to some combination of three erroneous misperceptions. First, romance and chanson are misread as interchangeable.1 Second, they are seen as just representing any old dead genres. Third, romance is viewed as a purely narrative form and interchangeable with heroic epic. Whilst falling into the second pitfall,2 Claude Morhange-Bégué offers a clue to solve the chanson/romance problem, in her fine and meticulous analysis of the poem's organisation around similarity and difference. Such a double-natured structure prompted me to read the Mal-Aimé as a romance, itself an essentially double genre within which the structures of similarity can be identified with the narrative part of romance, and those of difference with its lyric part.3 The lyric parts of romance, especially its central “hidden treasure,” are more enigmatic than the narrative parts, and have been labelled as disruptive. The resemblance is striking to what Apollinaire himself calls “intermèdes intercalés” in the Mal-Aimé. 4 One, the Sept Épées, has proven of great attraction to literary critics because of its trickster secretive word-play. I shall extend the lyric parts to include the “Moi qui sais…” refrain stanzas (19 and 59), in which I include its fragmentary/echo use in the title and epigraph (stanza 0), and in stanzas 40-41. A refrain acts as the key to unlock its lyric poem, acting like a romance’s centre. The “Moi qui sais” refrain is doubly important, as it is both such a key and such a hidden treasure when it names the “Mal-Aimé.” It seems reasonable to read the romance, amongst other Medieval references, into the Mal-Aimé. Apollinaire was an accomplished Medieval reader. As a schoolboy, he was already well-versed in all that was considered Classical for the French educational establishment. I use “Classical” in the literal sense of material taught in classes in schools and so transmitted as common cultural heritage. The patrimoine national melting-pot includes Medieval literature as it stems from the first time when distinctly French culture came into being, through the first use of the vernacular for cultural purposes such as writing. Apollinaire also appears to have been extraordinarily well-read outside the usual standards, first as an adolescent then via peregrinations in the Paris libraries, including the Bibliothèque Nationale with its vast Medieval holdings.5 !2 A first part of the paper is on romance and lyric refrain, in general and then as applied to the Mal-Aimé. Principal themes common to romance and to the Mal-Aimé are set up: duplicity, fragmentation, multiplications of dissemination and dissemblance. The second part, on dissemination, is a close reading, retracing my steps from the end of the poem backwards, from that moment of dawning realisation that the last stanza was a refrain. Reading itself becomes a present lyric moment with full consciousness of past and future. In a final part, I look at the Mal- Aimé part of the title. Articulated through the continuing dissemination theme and also through dissemblance, the main message of the poem is the poet's consciousness through finding his identity as “Guillaume Apollinaire,” the new poet of the new dawn, inside his renewed poetry. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. ROMANCE AND REFRAIN Romance, interchangeably roman or romance, is understood and used here in the sense of the 12th - 15th century works with which Apollinaire would have been familiar.6 The genre is characteristically slippery. To be fair to those critics just accused of ignorance or misreading, much research has been done on romance during and since their time, but findings have probably been restricted to a Medievalist readership. Certain basic features of romance have, nonetheless, remained constant throughout the last two centuries’ scholarship. It is a verse form, and it is long.7 Metrically, it is almost always octosyllabic. It may or may not show separation between parts, whether of a more narrative episodic character, or in laisses, which seem of a fluid or fused narrative and lyric character, or in something approximating stanzas. Structurally, it is circular and chiasmic, built around a centre from which frames unfold.8 Usually, these unfolding layers move from a centre concerned with deep inner themes: truth, meaning, a question, or a revelation, often of identity. Movement of the frames is towards the outside world, the apparently and superficially real. Periods of flow, temporal continuity, movement, adventure and quest contrast with moments of rupture, temporal stasis of stationary contemplation, immediate and question, such as the centre. The whole work is of a dual nature, narrative and lyric. Morhange-Bégué's structures of similarity map onto the narrative-quest aspect of romance, structures of difference onto the lyric-question parts.9 This dualism echoes the central figure’s dual nature: outer, narrative man of action and adventure; and inner, lyric man of thought and feeling. narrative-movement-quest and lyric- moment-question, .10 The central figure’s dual nature stresses the fact that Medieval romance is far from being just about action-hero knights and only about adventure. That is a common misconception, in part the result of a superficial reading which misses half the point, by missing the lyric part of romance. It is also simplistic to read the narrative-adventure-quest part of romance as a linear progression from beginning to end. Adventure, as its ad + venire etymology !3 suggests, may be about the quest of “getting somewhere” and “getting something,” attaining a goal.11 The romance will be more concerned with the means of getting there, with the parvenir in addition to the avenir. Furthermore, arrival and some sense of completion of the quest do not happen at the end, as would be expected in a plain adventure, but about half way through. What happens at the centre will change the nature of the quest, or reveal that it was actually about something else all along, or otherwise start up the action again, regenerate or renew the romance. It may be new knowledge. More usually, it is renewed knowledge, in the form of something whose existence antedated that of the rest of the romance, but was unknown to it until that point, say because it was hidden. It may be the renewed knowledge of an obvious truth staring characters and reader in the face all along. In the second half of a romance it becomes clear to the reader that chiasmic frames are in operation, as each repeat/echo is encountered. While the reader is conscious of the circularity of design, she is also conscious that the design traced is not an exact circle. The second half of the romance is not a mirror image, a precise replica of itself in its first half. The middle was a turning-point whose new knowledge also inflects the purpose and meaning of what preceded it, and changes the central figure and the whole romance (and indeed the reader herself), through reading and remembering. We thus have a structure of souvenir to add into avenir and parvenir. The romance’s second half is not one of repetition nor of complete novelty, then, but of renewal. As the reader continues, her reading of each succeeding part is informed not only by the new material unfolding in front of her, but also by its parallel in the first half. The new knowledge of the central event affects both her perception of the old parallel part, and the new one. Each stage of reading in this second half is rich multiple. Multiple and simultaneous readings work like any other inter-textual reference. Further enrichments to the reading will continue with repeated readings: the romance actually grows. Indeed this additional renewal in reading is what makes the romance alive in an organic sense unique to the genre. The structure is therefore not the closed circle of a belt-buckle, but an open circle or spiral. The earliest romances12 are a “conflation” or fusion of old and new, in that they use old material - the matières de Thèbes, de Rome et de Bretagne - in a new way. The new way may involve mingling aspects of more than one matière, and sometimes not so much those of more distant pasts, bordering on if not fully in “myth,” but rather of closer history, such as that of France. The end result is the creation of an Other World. Inter-textual reference enriches the text. It can be detected in the metaphoric and metonymic use of the chosen matière itself (which refers to all other works in that same tradition, say of Bretagne), in the citation of phrases from other works seamlessly interwoven into this particular romance, and indeed in almost any single word used as allusively portentous. These romances are also characterised by renewal, or renaissance, as they are written not in the old literary language, Latin, but in the new vernacular; hence the !4 name romance, as the first ones known were written in Old French.